


The Devil They Know

by Miss_M



Category: Ready or Not (2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood, Canon-Typical Content, Daniel Le Domas Lives, Deal with a Devil, Demon Summoning, F/M, First Kiss, Plotty, Rituals, Road Trips, Worldbuilding, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:00:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27970439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, Grace told a devil: “Wait!”
Relationships: Daniel Le Domas/Grace Le Domas
Comments: 8
Kudos: 91
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	The Devil They Know

**Author's Note:**

  * For [liesmyth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/liesmyth/gifts).



> I own nothing.

“Wait!”

The humanoid shape in the chair had mostly dissolved back into the flames licking up and out of the fireplace. Only the white patch of his old-timey cravat remained discernible among the flames, before the figure reassembled itself, its yellow eyes fixed on Grace.

It didn’t speak with a human voice. The crackle of fire starting to eat into the antique sideboard by the fireplace said: “What is it?”

The hand Grace cradled against her chest was killing her. She could taste fresh blood – Alex’s – on her lips, cloying iron and copper. Every joint in her body ached, and she was shaking with the repeat waves of adrenaline and fatigue which had coursed through her all night. 

“Bring Daniel back,” she blurted out when the man made out of yellow flames turned visibly impatient. “Daniel Le Domas,” she clarified, just in case. “Please.” 

She owed Daniel, life for a life. She figured it was lucky that he’d died before dawn, so his body remained mostly intact. How hard could a little light resurrection be for a literal devil?

The fire crackled, eating up wood and wallpaper, making fine china and crystal in the sideboard shatter with a sound like laughter. “And in return?”

Fuck. Of course. Demons and devils didn’t grant favors for free, and Grace had nothing much to offer. Even if she’d had something – even though Mr. Le Bail had shown himself to her because of how well she’d done in his little game – she knew he held all the cards.

“What do you want in exchange?”

For a moment, Le Bail wore Helene’s face, Tony’s face, Becky’s face – sharp, condescending, weirdly pleased – then the fire licking up the walls and singeing the ceiling spoke before Le Bail vanished, his essence sucked back into the fireplace, leaving Grace alone in the burning dining room.

Out in the hall, a cough cut through the sounds of the house fire.

Grace ran out into the hall, slipped and nearly fell in the blood that had been Emilie and her boys, and found Daniel propped up on his elbow on the marble floor, retching and coughing, his face and shirt smeared with his blood.

Grace knelt beside him. She realized she was grinning, her eyesight blurred with smoke and tears. “Daniel. Thank god.”

“Think you might have the wrong entity there,” he quipped and spat on the floor, then pushed himself up to a sitting position. He looked like hell, but the look he turned on Grace was sharp. “What did you do?”

She opened her mouth to answer, but someone was kicking down the ornate front door, firefighters were pouring into the hall, gesturing to each other and dragging dripping firehoses. 

Grace staggered up, waved to show she was unarmed. “Over here, please!”

One of the firefighters cut toward her, and Grace tried on a smile, hoping it wouldn’t look too awful with all the blood.

The guy trudged past her like she wasn’t there, stopped at the dining-room door, and yelled back over his shoulder. “Looks like it started here. Mickey, Raul – with me!”

Two more firefighters hustled past Grace, passing close enough that she felt them brush against her yet giving no indication they noticed her. They sidestepped Daniel where he sat on the floor, parting like water around a stone, but again like they weren’t even aware they were dodging around a person on their way to put out the fire.

“What the fuck?” Grace yelled after them. More firefighters kept coming in, and she could see red and blue rotating lights on the cars parked outside, hear the static of police radios. She waved both arms, her wounded hand smarting. “Hello? Are you fucking blind?”

Her voice echoed around the hall and up the spiral staircase, but no one paid any attention. Grace nearly screamed when Daniel touched her arm. “Come on,” he said, much calmer than she, and steered her out of the way of the firefighters. 

Grace dug her heels in – hard to do in her Chuck Taylors on the polished floor, but she did her best. 

“You need medical assistance! I need medical assistance.” She snatched her arm away and started back the way they’d come. “Why the fuck can’t they see us?”

“You made a deal,” Daniel replied. “Didn’t you?”

Grace glanced back at him, feeling guilty then furious. How dare he call her out? But Daniel didn’t look disappointed or disapproving, just tired and covered in blood. 

“Guess whatever you got from Mr. Le Bail comes with a side of going unnoticed by normal people. Or living people.” Daniel frowned as he said this last bit, glanced down at himself, flexed his hands slowly. 

He touched the nearest wall. His hand didn’t go through it, and when he rapped his knuckles against it, they both heard the knock. Yet firefighters and now also cops continued to swarm through the house, paying the bloodstained pair standing in a corner of the hall no mind.

With her teeth, Grace tugged on the grimy, bloody sleeve of her wedding dress, which she’d used as a makeshift bandage. It peeled away from her hand with a sickening squelch, and while it was hard to tell with all the encrusted blood, she was fairly certain her hand was no longer bleeding, though it still hurt. All of her cuts and bruises, the rope burns on her wrists and ankles, the muscles in her neck and back she’d pulled when she’d crashed Stevens’ car – it all hurt, but as though the pain existed at a distance and reached her with a time delay, like light from a star. Grace sniffed her armpit: she reeked, primarily of blood, but other things too.

Her stomach growled really loudly. Daniel met her eye, his eyebrow cocked. 

“We’re definitely not dead,” Grace said. “At least, I’m not. Um, how do you feel?” That sounded pretty inadequate under the circumstances, but she couldn’t think of a better way to ask the question.

Daniel felt the side of his neck, patting himself gingerly, reluctant to touch the wound which had killed him. “I can feel the hole, but it’s not bleeding anymore. Grace, what the hell did you give Le Bail to make this happen?”

Grace looked around the hall. No fire crackled within earshot anymore, nor could she see any flames. Thick smoke trailed through the house, but Grace found that it didn’t irritate her airways at all, although she could taste charred wood and burnt upholstery in the back of her throat. Across from the dining room and the music room, where Grace had thrown the lantern down to break on the floor and spill liquid fire all over the curtains and the Persian carpet, a corridor led away into the other wing of the house, which seemed untouched by the conflagration. 

“Isn’t that where the kitchen is?” she asked, pointing. Daniel nodded.

Grace crossed the hall, past the milling firemen. Daniel followed her in silence. 

The next hour was taken up with finding a bathroom away from all the foot traffic, scrounging together clean clothes from the bedrooms upstairs – that wing of the house held Helene’s suite and several guestrooms – and dodging the confused and grossed-out police and firefighters as they discovered the traces of several people having spontaneously exploded in the recent past, among the wreckage. 

Grace overheard “home invasion,” “was it an IED, what the fuck,” and “no survivors? Roger that.” She could no longer ignore her painfully empty stomach, darted past a couple of uniformed cops into the kitchen, snatched up a jar of cashews off the nearest shelf, and scurried back to the guest bathroom where she’d left Daniel. 

She’d put on khakis which were a little too short on her and a big sweater in a shade of purple so dark it looked almost black, which smelled of musk and incense. Helene’s whole room had smelled like that. Grace tried hard not to think of Helene chanting as they’d held her down, Tony looming over her, Alex raising the knife to kill her. Carrying an armful of generic but obviously expensive men’s casual wear she’d found in a chest of drawers in one of the guestrooms under her good arm, Grace unscrewed the lid from the jar of cashews with her bad hand, grimaced, and threw the lid on the floor, delighting in that additional, small desecration of the Le Domas home. She dug out a handful of nuts, her mouth flooding with saliva and the ragged hole in her palm smarting from the salt. 

Munching and hearing the shower still running, she stepped into the bathroom – they hadn’t bothered to lock the door, it wasn’t like anyone could see them – and nearly ran into a cop who had one hand on her holster and held the shower curtain open with the other. She was looking through Daniel, who stood under the steaming spray and didn’t bother to cover himself, even when his eyes flicked to Grace frozen on the bathmat behind the cop, her half-open mouth full of cashews. 

The cop reached past Daniel and turned the water off. She stood there a moment longer, frowning without seeing the dripping Daniel. Grace jumped out of her way when she stomped off, toggling the radio clipped to her shoulder: “Did someone take a fucking shower in the east wing? And leave the water running? What the fuck is wrong with you all?”

Grace looked at Daniel, and Daniel looked at her while they listened to the cop’s muttering recede down the hallway. Grace put the stack of clothes on the sink, dug out another handful of cashews, and added the open jar to the pile. 

“Hurry up, we shouldn’t hang around,” she said, and turned, and would have left Daniel to get dressed in some semblance of privacy, only Daniel’s voice stopped her in her tracks.

“Are you going to tell me what Le Bail asked of you already?”

Grace’s breath whistled between her teeth – she could still get hungry, check; she could feel pain, check; she was still breathing, double check – and despite everything, she thought that she understood Alex a tiny bit, in between all her anger and her hurt. There was no easy way to say this, though Alex hadn’t even tried till it was too late, the son of a bitch. 

Without turning around, Grace replied to Daniel’s question with another question: “Who the fuck is Gerald Robbins?”

“Why?” 

Going by Daniel’s tone, he knew the name. Grace had figured he might.

“Le Bail wants me to kill him before the sun rises tomorrow.” 

Grace closed her eyes for a moment and let the implications wash over her. The voice from the fire had been muffled but clear – there could be no mistake. She stepped out of the bathroom and pulled the door shut with one last “hurry up.”

By the time they were ready to head to the garage, photographers had arrived on the scene. Grace suggested taking the servants’ corridors. “They can’t see us but we might show up on camera, I don’t know,” she said.

In no time at all, with Daniel leading the way through the cobwebbed and mouse-droppinged secret passages, they stood side by side in the cavernous garage, before a row of expensive cars in the same neutral, tasteful colors as the clothes Daniel and Grace now wore: navy blue, charcoal, taupe, black. Grace clocked a Porsche, a Maserati, a Hummer with FITCH U vanity plates, a 1980s Lincoln Town Car gleaming like a beetle. Her eyes skimmed past Alex’s olive-green Subaru, a knot of tension between her shoulder blades. 

“Which one’s yours?” she asked.

Daniel started to move toward the Town Car. Grace was surprised – it didn’t seem like his style. 

Daniel said, “My keys are upstairs, or in a police evidence bag. Or burned to a misshapen lump. But don’t worry.” He opened the driver’s side door, glanced over it at Grace with a small smile. “I had a very misspent youth.”

He fumbled under the steering wheel, and after less than a minute, with a muffled curse from wires throwing off sparks which burned his bare hands, he managed to hotwire the Town Car. Grace glanced back at the door leading into the house when the engine turned over, but no heavy footsteps sounded in the hallway, no one threw open the door and pointed guns at them.

She caught Daniel watching her and lifted her chin with more defiance than she felt. “I’ll drive. You lie down on the back seat, you must be…” _Dead tired_. She bit that back. “… beat.” 

“And you?”

She shook her head. “I’m too wired to sleep.” 

The kind of mood one of her foster brothers used to call _fuck it out or slug it out_. For a moment, Grace considered stopping at a motel for a few hours, regrouping, considering their options. Climbing on top of Daniel like they had all the time in the world, and devil take the hindmost. But there was nothing to reconsider, nothing to compute – Le Bail had said _kill Gerald Robbins_ , the sun was climbing the sky steadily toward noon, and whether because he didn’t want her to go alone, or because he didn’t want to be alone, or because two people invisible to everyone else were better than one, Daniel seemed determined to accompany her. 

The sound of the garage door opening drew half a dozen cops outside. Bullets pinged off the Town Car’s immaculate bodywork, kicked up dust around their wheels. Grace accelerated down the driveway while, in the back seat, Daniel laughed and flipped off the quickly receding house and the cops arranged in front of it like bowling pins. No one followed them. Grace wondered what the cops had seen: a car moving with no visible driver? Did they just hear an invisible car?

She made her grip on the steering wheel relax – her wounded hand throbbed evilly, as did her shoulder where Alex had stabbed her, though the edges of the hole in her palm remained pale and dry – and focused on following Daniel’s directions. Silently she kept retreading the info Daniel had shared about Gerald Robbins: one of Tony Le Domas’ golf buddies, industry tycoon, rich as Roosevelt, paid hefty fines for his factories polluting the environment and laughed it off as the cost of doing business, credible reports of using child labor never managed to stick to him, thrice widowed and currently engaged to the future Mrs. Robbins #4. 

Grace repeated all this to herself over and over again. A very bad man. A man who deserved to die. 

A living human person that she would have to kill.

Her hands felt like claws, she was squeezing the steering wheel so hard. She shifted around in her seat, tried to stretch her neck, work the knotted muscles in her shoulders and back, the long cut from where the iron fence had sliced her pulling at her skin and nerve endings but not bleeding. She angled the rearview mirror to check on Daniel, who had his arm thrown over his eyes and lay still, one of his legs bent stiffly with the foot planted against the back door, his other foot resting in the foot well. Grace could see the mangled wound on his neck, no neat round hole but a barely-closed, unbleeding gash, the flesh and skin pale and shredded like her palm.

Her nerves thrumming, Grace flicked on the radio, turned the volume way down. 

_I’m a man of wealth and taste, I’ve been around for a long long year, stole many a man’s soul to waste…_

“Oh fuck you,” she growled and slammed the on/off button with the ball of her good hand, earning herself another bruise to add to her collection.

Halfway to Robbins’ estate in the mountains, the sun nearing its zenith, they had to stop for gas. Grace figured it would be just their luck if they blew up the gas station, since they had to leave the car running. She found some crumpled twenties in the glove compartment, so they left enough for the gas and a hefty tip tucked into the pump handle. A McDonald’s sat next to the gas station, and Grace realized she was starving, hoped that this was a good sign about her and Daniel’s whole life-death-something situation.

They couldn’t order since no one could see them or hear them, so Grace nudged Daniel, pointed at a paper bag waiting to be picked up at the end of the counter. “I’ll get another twenty from the car,” she said. 

“No, wait.” Daniel tugged his wedding ring off his finger – he had to twist it around a bit before it slipped past the second knuckle – and laid it on the counter before he snatched up the takeout bag and cut his eyes at Grace, then at the sliding doors. “Move it!”

Grace was already moving when she remembered: “They can’t see us.”

“… Oh yeah.”

Laughing, gulping the cool air of early fall, Grace hotfooted it back to the car. No one came after them, so maybe whatever they touched did become as invisible as they, but she and Daniel still laughed till they were out of breath, like they’d just heard the best joke ever, as Grace peeled away from the little strip mall and accelerated back onto the highway. When Daniel opened the bag to inspect their loot and discovered they’d stolen the meal of a rare Filet-O-Fish fan, that just seemed like the perfect coda to the past twenty-four hours. Grace munched and laughed till the road blurred before her eyes and she had to pull over onto the narrow gravel shoulder before she missed a twist in the road and sent them flying off the side of the mountain. 

“Grace,” Daniel said softly. 

She pushed open the car door and stepped outside, ignoring Daniel’s hand reaching for her. “I’m fine. I’m going to rest now. You drive.” 

She didn’t think she could sleep, but the bone-aching exhaustion of her wedding night and the steady vibrations of the moving car made her sink into dreamlessness like a stone into deep water. An unknown length of time later, she was jolted awake by a bump in the road and Daniel’s quiet voice talking to… not her. To no one. Reciting the only prayer that came easily to him.

“… from all past error and delusion. That, having set our foot upon the path of darkness, we may not weaken in our resolve. But, with thy assistance, grow in wisdom and strength. Hail Satan.” 

His easy cadence and calm tone clashed with Grace’s stomach-churning memories of hearing those words spoken while she’d struggled against hands holding her down, the Le Domases' voices raised in feverish triumph, their eyes glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece. All save Alex, who’d looked down at her with such cold eyes. 

Daniel sighed and resumed talking, and Grace lay very still and kept her eyes closed as she listened. Eavesdropped. She wasn’t proud of herself for that. 

“So, hail,” Daniel said conversationally. “You know they all believed in you and did what you asked, right until the end. So maybe you could go a little easy on them. Maybe let Emilie keep those horrible brats of hers, and hey, that way she’ll get to witness them suffering and they her, so win-win for you, right? I don’t know what to ask for Alex, but he was supposed to be your favorite, so you know… And don’t put Charity in the lake of ice, okay? She always hated the cold.” 

He sniffed. Grace cracked open her eyes – from her angle on the back seat, she could just about see Daniel wipe his eyes brusquely with the back of his hand while he drove. In the forest, after she’d crashed the car, he’d told her he couldn’t let his family die because of her, even though he knew much better than even Grace did just how much they sucked. Grace supposed it was lucky for her that she and Daniel were the only two left – if Daniel had had to choose between her and them again, she wouldn’t have liked to lay bets either way.

“Heard enough?” Daniel said. “Have I humanized them for you a little?”

Grace blinked, made a face, and pulled herself upright on the back seat, all her wounds protesting but her bone-deep fatigue having eased a bit. She rested her elbow on the back of the driver’s seat and peered at the road ahead. “Are we there yet?”

“Just a few more miles.”

The engine hummed, tires chewed the asphalt, and they sat in tense silence. Grace looked sideways at the sliver of Daniel’s profile, the hair curling on the back of his neck, his hands on the steering wheel. He was breathing deeply and slowly through his mouth.

Grace laid her hand on the back of his neck: dry, warm, smooth. His hair tickled her fingers. Her entire central nervous system performed a quick two-step at the realization that she could touch him: they recognized each other as alive even if no one else did, and not just in the philosophical sense. 

Daniel sniffed, like he badly needed a hanky, and Grace said: “It’s okay. Blink. Blink hard. Don’t crash this car, now.”

“Screw off,” he said in a neutral tone. “What about you? You’re a widow woman now.”

Grace nearly took her hand away, left it where it was. “Yeah, I’m not ready to crack jokes about that yet.”

The odometer ticked up. Daniel said, “You know, when it was all happening, Alex told me you’re everything to him. Or you were everything to him.”

“ _Don’t_.” She’d overheard Helene and Tony discussing Alex, who’d seen Mr. Le Bail as a child and never escaped the pull of being that person. Even Daniel had described him as Le Bail’s favorite. “Just… don’t.”

They rounded a curve in the road and saw, in the gap between two slopes overgrown with thick pine forest, a mansion which made the Le Domas home look like a pool house. The road wound uphill toward it. 

“I think Alex really, badly wanted to be normal,” Grace offered grudgingly, staring ahead, her fingertips massaging the back of Daniel’s neck; he didn’t seem to mind. “At any cost.” The fucker.

Daniel pumped the brake, pulled into an empty rest area ringed by pine trees like sentinels. He said: “A real boy.”

“Yeah.” Grace took her hand away when Daniel turned the key in the ignition. The engine clicked and pinged in the mountain air. “Come on, we only have a couple of hours left till sundown.”

They hiked uphill through the pines, Daniel giving Grace a hand on the steep parts, and though she could manage on her own, she took his hand and let him help her every time. Soon they stood on a bluff overlooking Gerald Robbins’ massive front gate topped with ornate, cast-iron bats, the long driveway, and that humongous house, its windows ruddy with afternoon sunlight. 

Grace was sweating in her borrowed ( _stolen_ ) sweater, scuffing the red earth covered in pine needles with her dirty yellow Chucks – she couldn’t find any other shoes which fit her during her hurried ransacking of Helene’s wardrobe, so she’d kept her own shoes, even though they were disgusting. Grace told herself they were her lucky charm. 

She considered her options – she had no weapon, no plan, no knowledge of Robbins’ security or the layout of his house. Maybe she and Daniel could get inside, they were invisible after all, but what if somehow Robbins could see them: _Tony Le Domas’ son dropped by unexpected, how lovely, do please come in and murder me…_

Even if all those pieces just fell into place, Grace was… Grace was at a total loss. 

She turned away from the house and sat down under a pine tree as tall as a smallish skyscraper. “I don’t think I can do this.”

Daniel glanced at her, ambled over slowly, and squatted down beside her. “I figured as much. You seemed pretty determined.”

Grace pulled up her knees, buried her head in her hands. “I know that Robbins is a very bad man. I know what the price will be if I don’t kill him. But I just… can’t. I _can’t_.” To her disgust, she started to cry. “I’m so sorry, Daniel.” 

She knew how feeble it sounded. She’d killed Becky and Stevens and would have killed any of the others that came near her if they hadn’t exploded. All at once, the weight of all those deeds, the past day and night and the day before, crashed down on her and buried her, like she was already six feet deep. The aches and twinges and pulsing soreness she’d been keeping at bay through sheer bloody-mindedness roared over her, so that all she could do was sit and weep.

Daniel took her wrist gently. She resisted him, kept her hands pressed to her face, and sobbed into her palms, the tears stinging her wound. 

“I can do it.” Daniel sounded like he was trying to convince himself as much as her. 

“No, you don’t understand, it has to be me, that goddamn son of a bitch,” Grace blubbered, her words tripping over themselves, snot dripping down her chin. She pulled her wrist out of Daniel’s grasp and wiped her face on the sleeve of her sweater. 

“What exactly did Le Bail tell you?”

A part of her wanted to jump on Daniel and scratch his eyes out for adopting that reasonable, calm, talking-to-a-crazy-person tone with her. An equally large part of her wanted to let him hold her, and cry into his chest like an idiot, and just sit there until Le Bail made Daniel explode at sunrise.

“Not much,” Grace said. “I asked him to please bring you back, and he said I had to kill Gerald Robbins before sunrise tomorrow. That’s it. Pretty clear-cut.”

Daniel’s silence had a palpable quality, like a pillow smothering her. Grace blinked at him. He looked like he had in that other forest, when he’d told her he couldn’t let his family die but didn’t want her to die either. 

“Bring me back?” Daniel said. “Grace, I wasn’t dead. I was close to it, maybe that’s why he didn’t bother. I could feel it creeping over me, but I saw Emilie and her kids run out into the hall and…” He mimed an explosion, blowing air out of his lungs in a _kaboom_ noise. “There was nowhere for Le Bail to bring me back from.”

Grace shook her head. “But… but you just said it! You were nearly dead. He brought you back, he made your wound stop bleeding.”

“You weren’t close to dying, and he made your wounds stop bleeding too. Son of a bitch. You know, they don’t call Le Bail and all his kind _princes of lies_ for nothing.” Daniel leaned his head back against the trunk of the pine tree. “Dad said, you don’t fuck Mr. Le Bail. Mr. Le Bail fucks you. He likes games. Why would he have given you such a sweet, sweet deal: a simple, straightforward murder in exchange for something that wasn’t even Le Bail’s to give you?”

“He showed himself to me,” Grace said. “Maybe… maybe I impressed him.” It sounded like the world’s dumbest humblebrag. 

“No, that’s not it. He needed an idle pair of hands to do his work.”

“Well, then, what’s so special about this Robbins character?”

Daniel looked at her, really focused his wandering, questing attention on her, and in that moment, Grace wasn’t sure she liked it one bit.

“We have two problems,” Daniel explained. “One, who Robbins belongs to and why Le Bail wants him. And two, you, Grace. Robbins may be a prime cut of asshole like the worst of us, but he hasn’t done anything to you. If you kill him, your soul will be tainted and then you might forfeit it to Le Bail more easily than before, when you were just defending yourself.”

Grace tried to process all that, gave up, and focused on item number one. “What do you mean, who Robbins belongs to?”

Daniel jerked his head at the house. “Notice the artwork on top of the gate? Bats. As in, lord of the bats. Sometimes lord of the flies, the translation varies. And sometimes he’s just The Flying Lord. Beelzebub, or whatever name he goes by up here.”

Grace licked her lips. Of fucking course. Plenty of greedy assholes to go around, for all the princes of hell to get their share. “Does that help us or put us even deeper in the shit?”

Daniel stood and brushed the pine needles off his pants. “In hell’s hierarchy, Beelzebub is higher up than Le Bail, or fuck it, Belial. Fuck him and his pseudonym. Thinks he’s clever, I figured it out when I was four.”

Grace’s mind was racing, adrenaline flooding her system again. Already. Again, even as she sat still in a pine forest. “So Le B… Belial wants to poach one of Beelzebub’s…” She wasn’t sure what to call them, and she didn’t want to hurt Daniel’s feelings. Protégés? Clients? Playmates? “One of the souls pledged to Beelzebub. Judging from the size of that house, one of Beelzebub’s favorites. So how do we let Beelzebub know? Fight fire with fire.”

Daniel glanced at her, then away, and shook his head. “That just tripped right off your tongue, and you’ve only been a Le Domas for a day.”

“Daniel. I’m serious. Also, screw you.”

He raised his hands in a placating gesture. “Okay, okay. There are rituals, formulas for a summoning. I don’t know enough off the top of my head. When I was growing up, what we did were basically maintenance rituals. Sacrifice a goat, reaffirm the bond. My great-great-grandfather didn’t even summon Belial, Belial came to him. But,” he added, seeing Grace’s expression darken, “I know who might have known. Aunt Helene was in charge of my and Alex and Emilie’s occult education. There should be books in her room, information, spells written down. Good thing that part of the house didn’t burn.”

Almost like a higher power was looking out for them, Grace thought, but while she had only moderate trouble accepting the reality of incarnate evil, she was not so far gone as to believe the playing field was level and armies of light were ranged behind Daniel and she in what was to come. Nothing and no one whatsoever had their backs except each other.

She sighed. “So, home again, home again?”

Daniel nodded. “Jiggity jig.”

It was past midnight by the time they drove up to the half-charred Le Domas mansion, festooned with yellow caution tape yet empty of people. In Helene’s bedroom, the scent of incense was even thicker than before, mixed with the lingering wood smoke from the west wing.

Daniel pulled a large book off the mantelpiece, where it had stood propped up like the photograph of a loved one. A rusty clasp held its wooden covers, carved with runes, closed. The many different handwritings on the velum pages ranged from the faded and illegible, to the neatly printed in blue ballpoint pen. There were illuminations in brilliant crimson and green and gold leaf, and pen drawings of demons and the magical shapes one had to draw in order to transact business with them, and marginal doodles of poisonous-looking flowers and hypnotic spirals and simplified, stylized sex acts like on the wall of a public bathroom. 

“This was her favorite grimoire,” Daniel explained. “Aunt Helene used to collect them. One of her hobbies.”

“What were the others? Pinning butterflies to cardboard? Tripping up kids with crutches?”

“And tax evasion.”

Grace took the grimoire from Daniel. It weighed a ton, and she realized that she was getting hungry again. Her arms shook a little after the long drive. 

While Daniel scrounged together a meal from the disparate foods left in the pantry and the kitchen, which didn’t reek of smoke and hadn’t got spilled or soaked by the firefighters, Grace sat on the bed in one of the guestrooms and leafed through the typewritten pages containing an index, which Aunt Helene had sewn in at the back of the grimoire, complete with her own marginalia calling out the intellectual deficiencies of the book’s past owners in between a lot of “my infernal lord”’s and “Hail Satan”’s. 

They ate off of a white cloth napkin Daniel spread on the bed: smoked salmon (“What, no caviar?” Grace quipped, and Daniel batted back, “It tastes like a fish fucked a facial cleanser”), cherry tomatoes preserved in olive oil with herbs, the dry end of a baguette. They toasted each other with bourbon from mismatched coffee mugs.

“Here’s to our continued existence and, well, sorta health,” Daniel said. 

Grace snorted and drank. She ran her finger down the letter S in the grimoire’s index: _sacrifice (animal, human); seeing, gift of; soul (properties of, trade in, value of); summoning…_ She flipped to the relevant pages and read. 

Daniel moved to her side of the improvised picnic, sat close enough that the mattress dipped under Grace, and read over her shoulder. “Top you up?”

Grace grinned and held out her mug while Daniel picked the bourbon bottle up off the floor. This felt like the last cigarette before going to face a firing squad – if he wanted to flirt, she could match him move for move, even as her eyes kept drifting back to the grimoire. “Did you see any boxes of salt in the kitchen?” 

Despite how Grace’s gut twisted when she crossed the threshold of that room again, they used the malachite table in what Daniel called with a completely straight face _the little salon_. That table already had a pentagram and the requisite magic symbols carved into its surface. Easier than Grace or Daniel fucking up the drawing and the Aramaic letters with only a couple of hours left till dawn. Grace tried not to dwell on how many people may have been tied down, chanted over, and slaughtered on that table over six generations of the Le Domas family.

Checking and double-checking the grimoire, they placed the necessary ingredients symbolizing the elements at the five points of the pentagram: a small heap of fine kitchen salt, a silver bowl full of clear tap water, a knife that had decorated the wall above Helene’s bed (old iron, not stainless steel), a perpetuum mobile from Tony’s desk (the endless swinging of the little balls on their orbital rings, around and around, represented the element of air), and a censer full of incense, which Grace lit with a box of matches from the kitchen. The tiny ember sent up fragrant, cloying smoke in a pencil-thin, lavender column. Grace placed the censer on the last empty point of the pentagram, on her left, while on her right lay the knife.

Daniel joined her where she stood, the pentagram like a person outstretched in front of them: they stood between its legs, its arms were flung out to the sides, and the fifth point, across from them, was its head. 

One last look at the grimoire, a quick run-through of the words they had to get just so, both of them mumbling, catching each other’s eye, Grace rolling her eyes despite knowing how serious this was and Daniel ducking his head so his smile wouldn’t be too obvious. 

“Okay,” Grace said and laid the book aside. “Here goes nothing.”

They both struck the pose described in the book: arms raised up in worship, facing the pentagram. 

“I summon thee, o prince of darkness, o spirit of the pit,” Grace recited. “I command thee to make thy most evil appearance.”

Daniel picked up where she left off: “I conjure thee by heaven and earth to come to us now, in no unpleasant shape, to do us no harm.”

Grace picked up the knife with its old blade made of corrugated iron. Holding it awkwardly in her non-dominant, injured hand, she made a shallow cut across her right palm. Shallow or not, it flooded with blood at once, blood overflowing the narrow wound, pooling in the hollow of her cupped palm.

She tipped her hand and let her blood drip inside the pentagram. “We conjure, bind, and charge thee,” she said, focusing on the sting of her hand and not how the words made her skin crawl, seemed to make the air in the room thicken.

Daniel took the knife from her, slashed his own palm, like they were kids making a blood oath, and added the drops of his blood to hers on the tabletop. “We adjure thee to come forth,” Daniel said.

They finished the formula together, with one voice: “Beelzebub above, Beelzebub below, o veni spiritus.”

Time ticked by. Grace breathed in, she breathed out, both of her hands hurting now, and was certain that they were idiots and it was all for nothing, when the stench of an overflowing septic tank rolled over them like a physical blow.

They both gagged. Breathing through her mouth did Grace no good; she could tell that Daniel was making this discovery himself. Still they held their hands out, their blood drip-drip-dripping and mixing inside the pentagram. 

Across from them, standing over the “head” of the pentagram, where the head of a strapped-down sacrificial victim would have been and Grace’s head had been only last night, stood Beelzebub. He looked a bit like a huge swarm of flies, and a bit like a huge bat, and a bit like a tall man in a black coat that was also bat wings whose span filled half the room. The stench emanating from him grew more and more nauseating till it almost ceased to register: it was simply one with the air. 

_Oh shit_ , Grace thought. The book had said that the demon would be confined inside the pentagram!

Beelzebub spoke, his words like the buzzing of many flies. 

“You dare to z-z-zummon me?”

Grace adopted what she hoped was a properly reverential pose – the grimoire had been a bit hazy on that account – and said: “Lord Beelzebub, greetings. We brought you here not to importune but to warn you.”

“Warn me? You?” The frequency of the flies’ buzzing grew rapid and shrill: an infernal titter.

Daniel spoke up: “Belial – Le Bail – wants to trick you. He’s trying to steal Gerald Robbins away from you.”

The flies roiled, but at the center of the swarm, the dark essence stood very still. It might have stood thus waiting for the tectonic plates to shift, like time couldn’t touch it. The bat wings stretched and flapped, wafting a dung-scented wind around the room. 

“Proof? Evidenz-z-ze?”

Grace gagged, swallowed, nearly threw up, and spoke: “My word, lord! Belial offered me an unfair trade – something that wasn’t his to grant in exchange for Gerald Robbins’ life. He knows Robbins is pledged to you. He wants to steal him away.” She hated how the old-timey formulas made her sound, reminded herself not to slip up and call Beelzebub “ _my_ lord” or they’d really be in for it.

Beelzebub seemed to vibrate in place, his multiple forms morphing into each other almost too fast for Grace to see. She couldn’t feel anything physical, but she was certain the devil was reading her soul, ferreting the truth of what she’d said out of her memory and her heart.

Beelzebub spoke words which hurt Grace’s ears to hear – she saw Daniel wince out of the corner of her eye – and made gestures her eyes blurred so as to prevent her from seeing. Then Belial was there, in the middle of the pentagram, his upper body roaring with yellow flames as he struggled to break free, but his feet rooted to the malachite tabletop, for he was standing in the small puddle of Grace and Daniel’s blood. The trap had been set, and now it had sprung – just not on the evil Grace and Daniel had intended.

More words in the language of hell. Accusation. Denial. Accusation. Grace was certain her eardrums would burst. Belial flailed, flinging a hurricane of fire around him, but the flames reached no farther than the edges of the pentagram. The furniture and the ceiling remained untouched, as did Beelzebub, and Grace, and Daniel.

Belial’s yellow eye fell on Daniel. 

Daniel met the devil’s eye and stepped in front of Grace, crowding up to the edge of the table, pushing her back a step. She grabbed his arm, his shoulder, tried to wrestle him back beside her, behind her, but Daniel held her back and faced Belial.

Daniel’s whole body shuddered. Even with the gale of Belial’s flames and Beelzebub’s foul wind, Grace heard Daniel sigh and gasp. The wound on his neck opened, and blood poured out, down Daniel’s front, his back, pooling rapidly on the floor. He buckled, went down on one knee, and Grace couldn’t hold him up, for all her injuries flared up – her hand, her shoulder, her back, everything – and she noticed blood dripping from the hole in the center of her left hand, blood soaking the sleeve and the back of her sweater, as she bent over Daniel, trying to pull him up to his feet or maybe just to keep herself from falling. 

With a final word and gesture from Beelzebub, Belial winked out of sight, taking his flames with him. The swarm of flies seemed pleased, the bat wings flapped in triumph, and for the second time in less than twenty-four hours, Grace told a devil:

“Wait!”

The flies swarmed and buzzed. The septic-tank stench clogged Grace’s nose, her throat, her lungs.

“You got him thanks to us,” she said, gagging, Daniel hanging limp and heavy in her arms. “Now here’s what I want in return: our whole lives, as they were allotted to us when we were innocent, and all our injuries healed. His _and_ mine.”

“Anything elz-z-ze?” 

Grace suspected that she would never again be able to hear a fly buzz without thinking the damn insect was condescending to her. 

“No.” She amended: “Not now. Thank you.”

“You don’t want any of the otherz-z-z back. I can z-z-zee why he liked you.” 

The rotting-gut stench still filled the room, but Daniel and Grace were alone. Grace wondered which _he_ Beelzebub had meant. The devil had spoken in the past tense – _he liked you_ – and with her heart hammering in her chest, she looked down at Daniel.

Daniel groaned, and rolled over, and sat up. “Grace.”

Grace let out a sound somewhere between a honk and a sob, and threw her arms around Daniel, and kissed him right on the mouth, to hell with their bloodstained clothes, and the stench in the room, and all the fucking rest of it. Tears rolled down her cheeks, into her mouth and Daniel’s. He licked her lips and pulled her even closer and tilted her head, his hand in her hair, to kiss her deeper. 

She was widowed less than a day, and even with how it had gone down, Grace knew she should feel guilty. But she didn’t. At all. Maybe later she would, but right now all she wanted was to taste the bourbon on Daniel’s lips, feel his teeth, his tongue, his beard tickling her. Life pounding through her, her body free of pain.

When they pulled apart, Grace couldn’t believe she was out of breath, and she didn’t care, happy to sit on the blood-sticky floor and let Daniel hold her for a bit. “How alive do you feel?” she asked, only somewhat joshing. 

“Pretty alive.” He kissed Grace’s forehead, her nose, making her snort. “This room smells like a latrine.”

“No shit,” Grace muttered, and then they had to take the time to laugh themselves breathless, and hoot, and cling to each other, and wipe their eyes, and finally help each other up and out into the hall, fling the front door open and let the night air in and the stench of hell out.

Grace checked her left hand – flexed it, its whole and undamaged unity of bone and nerve and tendon, and felt the absence of pain almost like a loss – felt her back under her clothes and couldn’t find the cut from the fence railing. She rolled her shoulder and felt it was fine. Only the thin slash across her right palm remained, bisecting her heart line, health line, and life line. How fucking apt, she thought. 

Daniel had a matching cut on his right palm, and his neck was stained red but smooth and whole. Grace was overwhelmed with a sudden impulse to kiss him right there, where his pulse beat under the blood and the unblemished skin. 

“You’re sure you feel fine?”

Daniel gave her that fond little smile she was starting to recognize. “You mean apart from the small matter of my soul still being forfeit? Fit as a fiddle. No complaints. Wouldn’t mind a drink to celebrate.”

Oh right – his soul. Grace started to speak and scowled, thinking. “We’ll get it back,” she declared more firmly than she felt. “Somehow. We’ll figure it out.”

Daniel took her hand. “Grace, listen to me. You have to be extra careful from now on. I doubt they’ll just let us go, and after everything that’s happened, everything you’ve done, summoning a prince of hell, Alex betraying you…” His voice broke a little, and Grace felt it in the pit of her stomach. “Your soul must be on the brink right now. And it’s… My natural impulse is to be flippant, but I won’t. It’s precious. You can’t afford to lose it.”

Grace squeezed his hand and got in his face. “Okay, first of all: screw you. I just saved your ass, you’re not bailing on me now. And second of all, what the hell else am I supposed to do? Go back to side hustles and driving for fucking Uber, volunteering at the animal shelter? Come on.”

Daniel shook his head. “ _What the hell_ is exactly what I’m worried about.”

Grace rolled her eyes, pulled her hand out of Daniel’s, his hand trailing after her as she went back to the little salon and picked up Helene’s grimoire.

She brandished it. “We’ve got the book and a Town Car with half a tank of gas, this house must be full of knickknacks we can sell for cash, provided that people will be able to see us now, and you were the one who said someone should burn it all down.” She grinned at Daniel. “Wanna finish what I started when I thought you were dead?”

“Damn,” Daniel said. “You’ve got it bad.”

Grace stuck out her tongue. “Only because you gave a shit when no one else did. Let’s wash and find more clean clothes to start with, okay?”

As they walked deeper into what was left of the Le Domas mansion, Grace noticed Daniel making a weird face, like he was trying to pick food out from between his teeth with his tongue. “What are you doing?”

“I think my wisdom teeth grew back. Fun. You did say _all injuries healed_ and _our lives as they were allotted to us when we were innocent_. Out of idle curiosity, do you think you might be a virgin again?”

“Daniel!” Grace swatted him on the arm, nearly dropped the grimoire. “Ask me nicely and maybe you’ll find out.”

Daniel gestured for her to precede him up the stairs to the east wing. “Yes, ma’am.”


End file.
